That’s not a suggestion to commit rude dining behavior. It’s a description of a musical comedy hitting North Coast Repertory Theatre this week as the last show in the Solana Beach company’s current season.

Gregg Coffin’s “Five Course Love” sounds as though it takes very seriously — not to mention literally — Shakespeare’s sentiment from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that “the course of true love never did run smooth.”

The piece, directed for NCRT by Rick Simas, is like five mini-plays, unfolding in a quintet of distinctly different restaurants: a Texas barbecue joint (and erstwhile sushi bar); a trattoria; a German place that’s a favorite haunt of a dominatrix; a cantina; and a ’50s-style diner.

All those dining spots serve up various recipes for romantic misfortune, with setup and pacing inspired by the “speed dating” phenomenon of a few years back.

Part of the fun behind the piece, which has been compared to the similarly vignette-driven comedy “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” is that only three actors play all 15 characters. At NCRT, Kevin B. McGlynn and Omri Schein portray the men; Kristen Mengelkoch steps in as the five women.

Both Schein and Mengelkoch are NCRT returnees and graduates of San Diego State University’s musical-theater MFA program, which Simas codirects. Mengelkoch also appeared in “Five Course Love” last year at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, N.Y., where the piece originated in 2003. (It went on to a healthy off-Broadway run.)

Everyone’s a foodie

Coffin’s play is hardly the first to stir some kitchen intrigue into the theater mix. Here, in honor of our “everyone’s a foodie” age, a tasting plate of other notable dining-minded works:

• “Fully Committed”: The San Diego-based actor David McBean has had four tour-de-force turns for Cygnet Theatre in Becky Mode’s solo play, portraying some 40 characters lighting up the reservations line of a snobby New York restaurant.

• “An Empty Plate in the Café Du Grand Boeuf”: The drama by Michael Hollinger (whose “Opus” was seen at the Old Globe recently) centers on a wealthy restaurant owner who vows to starve himself to death. Ernest Hemingway also figures into the story.

• “The Art of Dining”: The characters in this restaurant-set piece by Tina Howe (of the Tony-nominated “Coastal Disturbances”) have complex relationships with eating. (And talk about fear of food: During a 1980 performance in New York, a plate of crêpes Suzette exploded onstage, setting cast member Dianne Wiest’s hair on fire. She was in a burn unit for three weeks.)

• “The Food Chain”: Nicky Silver’s play hasn’t proved quite so hazardous, although those who saw this hard-edged comedy at the Globe in 2004 may have had to dodge the doughnut fragments spraying from an actor’s mouth in one particularly over-the-top scene.